a. Field of the Invention
The instant invention is directed toward a method and apparatus for screening securities. More specifically, it relates to apparatus and processes to facilitate screening of equities by investors while tracking various information about the equities.
b. Background Art
In the practice of evaluating securities, specifically stock equities, there are two common approaches: technical analysis and fundamental analysis. Technical analysis is the study of price and volume patterns displayed on charts, and fundamental analysis is the study of the performance of a company's business results. Applications that allow users to screen for investment prospects using technical and/or fundamental data points are called decision support tools. Competing decision support tools allow users to screen for many data points and present a flexible environment for users to test investment ideas.
However, existing applications require users to execute screens on a local computer in an ad hoc fashion. Such applications commonly require a user, for each screen query, to retrieve historical pricing and fundamental data from a local hard drive, one stock at a time in a serial fashion. Existing software must examine the data to see if it matches each argument of the query and then include or eliminate it from the hit list. Existing software must execute this process one time for each stock's historical pricing and once for each stock's fundamental data set. On a fast computer (Pentium III 500 MHz class) this process requires ten to fifteen minutes. This laborious pattern severely limits the average users desire to adjust their screens and perform what-if analysis, thus presenting the great need for a quicker stock screening process.
A further deficit in existing decision support tools in the lack of a rich results display. Currently available systems, see for example FIG. 8, generally provide a client with limited capabilities for sorting and viewing screen results. As shown in FIG. 8, one such prior art system 178 is displayed. This system 178 merely allows a client to sort a listing of stocks 180 based upon a single parameter 182 in either ascending or descending order 184. Additionally, this system 178 merely displays in the field 186 one parameter at a time. Therefore, a system is needed which allows a client to select and view multiple parameters pertaining to Stocks at a single instance on a single screen, based upon pre-determined and pre-selected screening requirements.
The idea that two heads, or more, are better than one is a concept that has been heavily adopted within the investment community. The term “community” in investment community denotes a sharing of information among investors. This sharing can take the form of organized investment clubs with a common goal or friends with an interest in sharing investment information. When an individual has found some useful information that has helped him or her, there is often a tendency to share this information with others. The advent of message boards, chat rooms, and other related Web sites have expanded this community and facilitated instant sharing of information with many individuals.
Existing products provide a limited attempt to help facilitate this sharing of information in the form of allowing investors to e-mail a stock chart to another individual. Investors can send other information by cutting or copying it from the application and putting it into another application that can then be attached into an e-mail. However, this is of greatly diminished value in that the process and data are not integrated and seamless. Thus, there remains an unfilled need to better facilitate the sharing of information (e.g., charts, screens, and watch lists) among investors.
While a few existing products offer users some help in understanding or interpreting the overall condition of the market, most offer limited or simplistic and isolated perspective on the market, while some provide single point data such as the percentage increase or decrease of some of the popular indexes. A problem with widely-quoted indexes (the Nasdaq Composite Index, Dow Jones Industrial Average, or the Standard and Poors 500 Index) is that they are weighted, meaning more consideration is given to larger companies. If one large stock on an index moves up and ten small stocks on the same index move down, the index could very likely show an overall move up, thus masking the true overall status of how all stocks have performed on a given day. Some fundamental news sources calculate and publish the Advance-Decline line. The Advance-Decline measurement indicates the number of stocks on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that have advanced and the number of stocks that have declined over a given period of time. No tool exists, however, for gaining insight into how the broader market (all stocks trading on the NYSE, the American Stock Exchange (AMEX), and Nasdaq Stock Exchange (NASDAQ) performs on an end-of-day basis. Therefore, there remains a need for a decision support tool offering overall performance information as to how all stocks have performed on a given day.
Additionally, professional investors realize, day trading is generally ill advised for the personal investor. Commonly, the personal investor will accept small gains in one position while letting losses grow too large in other positions—often to the detriment of the personal investors financial wealth. However, day traders often realize tremendous personal satisfaction when they choose that one correct position and reap, often temporarily, significant financial gains. Thus, a system is need which allows a personal investor to experience the highs of investing without suffering too many of the losses.